He grew desperate as time went by and the countess did not come to him.

A squad of gendarmes were marching along the park wall and stationing themselves as sentinels, each man being near enough to communicate with those on either side of them, by voice and eye.

Michu, lying flat on his stomach, his ear to earth, gauged, like a red Indian, by the strength of the sounds the time that remained to him.
"I came too late!" he said to himself.

"Violette shall pay dear for this! what a time it took to make him drunk! What can be done ?" He heard the detachment that was coming through the forest reach the iron gates and turn into the main road, where before long it would meet the squad coming up from the other direction.
"Still five or six minutes!" he said.
At that instant the countess appeared.

Michu took her with a firm hand and pushed her into the covered way.
"Keep straight before you! Lead her to where my horse is," he said to his wife, "and remember that gendarmes have ears." Seeing Catherine, who carried the hat and whip, and Gothard leading the mare, the man, keen-witted in presence of danger, bethought himself of playing the gendarmes a trick as useful as the one he had just played Violette.